Beginning with the basic conviction that acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences, Haunting Encounters traces the narrative strategies through which certain works fiction forge ...
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Beginning with the basic conviction that acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences, Haunting Encounters traces the narrative strategies through which certain works fiction forge connections with their readers—in particular, their white, Western readers—across boundaries of difference. Through the formal and aesthetic negotiations they carry out, which both draw readers in and set limits on their imaginative engagements, these works respond in concrete ways to the asymmetries of their circulation and consumption in our contemporary global age. By bringing the tools and methods of rhetorical narrative theory to bear on well-known works of ethnic and postcolonial literature, Haunting Encounters revises existing models of narrative ethics—both those based on empathy, and those grounded in alterity—to account for the particular complications and stakes of staging cross-cultural encounters in and through fiction. Illustrating that both sameness and difference are essential elements of our ethical encounters with fictional texts, Haunting Encounters ultimately advocates for a practice of global, comparative literary analysis that is energized, rather than confounded, by this fundamental tension.Less

Haunting Encounters : The Ethics of Reading across Boundaries of Difference

Joanne Lipson Freed

Published in print: 2017-09-15

Beginning with the basic conviction that acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences, Haunting Encounters traces the narrative strategies through which certain works fiction forge connections with their readers—in particular, their white, Western readers—across boundaries of difference. Through the formal and aesthetic negotiations they carry out, which both draw readers in and set limits on their imaginative engagements, these works respond in concrete ways to the asymmetries of their circulation and consumption in our contemporary global age. By bringing the tools and methods of rhetorical narrative theory to bear on well-known works of ethnic and postcolonial literature, Haunting Encounters revises existing models of narrative ethics—both those based on empathy, and those grounded in alterity—to account for the particular complications and stakes of staging cross-cultural encounters in and through fiction. Illustrating that both sameness and difference are essential elements of our ethical encounters with fictional texts, Haunting Encounters ultimately advocates for a practice of global, comparative literary analysis that is energized, rather than confounded, by this fundamental tension.